I decided to put a few hours into my very first Android app, Cow Tipping, over the weekend (originally released 8/1/2011). If you haven't seen it before, the gameplay consists of tapping on cows repeatedly to make them tip over, trying to tip as many as you can in 20 seconds. It was a pretty fun first-timer project for me, and since pushing out a bug-patched version 2 last fall, it has now gone untouched for 13 months. After getting familiar with my old code again (which included a lot of "huhs" and "why in the worlds"... n00b mistakes), I started getting pretty excited again. Believe it or not, Cow Tipping has averaged about 1000 downloads a month since its release, totaling nearly 14,000 total downloads today. While the app itself doesn't provide much value to anyone, really, and only sits at about 1700 active installs, I started to imagine the possibilities if I invested some time into adding new modes of gameplay or some system of levels.
Screen Shot 2012-10-16 at 9.00.47 AM
I decided to give it a test run by adding a "Frenzy Mode" in addition to the classic gameplay. In frenzy mode, cows tip over with a single click, as opposed to the variable number of clicks in the original release (random number between 2 and 5). Took me about 5 hours to clean things up, add the new gameplay mode, update the high scores screen, and add a Twitter share. I pushed out the update Monday night at about 7 PM and noticed it live at 9 PM. If it goes well then maybe it'll be worth adding more levels.